The One-Fence Solution

By GERSHOM GORENBERG

Published: August 3, 2003

Col. Dany Tirza switches into four-wheel drive, swerves around the water-filled ruts in the mud track in front of him and steers up a slope. Though he has an office in Jerusalem in the Israeli Army's Central Command and another in a Defense Ministry building in Tel Aviv, this car is Tirza's real HQ, and his real workplace is the Israeli countryside along the Green Line, the border between Israel and the land it has occupied since 1967. At the top of the hillock, he climbs out, hangs his assault rifle over his shoulder and looks out at his handiwork: a curtain of concrete stretching across the plain, broken by gray towers.

Beyond the wall, a low hill rises, covered with close-set houses: the town of Qalqilya, home to 43,000 Palestinians, at the very western edge of the occupied West Bank. On this side of the wall, the Israeli side, cars rush past on the newly opened north-south Trans-Israel Highway. The spot where we stand is on the outskirts of Kfar Sava, a Tel Aviv suburb.

On foreign maps, Qalqilya is outside Israel, on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. But the official maps of the Israeli government don't show the Green Line. For Israeli governments, the pre-1967 boundary is an armistice line that belongs to the past, and the real border remains to be set in future peace talks.

But if there is no border, there is now a barrier, a giant fence being constructed along the length of the country that will give physical form to the division between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Dany Tirza, 44, cleanshaven, with dark hair beginning to gray, is the man in charge of setting its precise route. The fence, Tirza asserts, is not a political measure, but a military one; Israel's army remains on both sides of the barrier, and Israeli settlements remain beyond it. Its intention, Tirza says, is to end the ''unbearable ease'' of terror. Less than a mile of open country, he notes, separates Qalqilya from Kfar Sava, and the Palestinian town was the base for the suicide bombing at the entrance to a Tel Aviv disco in June 2001, in which 21 Israelis died.

Yet in some way -- a way very much up for dispute -- Tirza is now designing a border between Israel and the West Bank, unilaterally imposed by Israel. For much of its length, the barrier will be a 240-foot-wide swath of barbed wire, sensors and roads, rather than a concrete wall. In either form, it will be a work of monumental proportions, a statement etched upon the land.

Tirza admits, in his quiet, confident, barely inflected voice, that the barrier ''is something that will apparently last for many years,'' becoming the ''reference line'' for any peace talks, even if not the final line. Diplomatically, the barrier project has sparked widespread objections: at the first meeting between Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, and Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, in May, Abbas demanded that Israel stop building the barrier. And at a late June meeting with Israel's security cabinet, Condoleezza Rice, the United States' national security adviser, reportedly said that the United States objected to the fence's construction. Along its route, both Jews and Arabs have angrily protested decisions about where it will run.

Tirza designed the wall that stands here, in front of Qalqilya, nearly 30 feet tall. He also put in the embankment that rises nearly to the top of the wall on the Israeli side. ''I made ramps,'' he explains, so that ''in a really extreme case'' an Israeli tank can climb the embankment and fire into Qalqilya.

As we watch, an olive green jeep climbs a ramp, stops so that the patrolling soldiers can look across and descends. The sunlight has become harsher; the barrier no longer looks like a curtain but like a prison wall. Palestinians say they're the ones jailed -- the barrier will completely surround Qalqilya, with just one exit, to the east, via an Israeli checkpoint. Or perhaps, as an Israeli critic suggests, Israelis are the ones inside the barrier, inside a fortress or a ghetto of their own making. The barrier is a statement, true, but its meaning is up for grabs.

When operation rainbow -- the unit that Tirza heads -- was established a decade ago, the Oslo peace process was beginning, and the mood was ''euphoric,'' Tirza says. He is driving north from Qalqilya along the so-called seam zone, a bit of Israeli officialese used to avoid reference to the Green Line or the word ''border.'' His cellphones keep ringing. Between interruptions, he describes the mood in the army in Oslo's early days. ''Our effort was to switch the diskette, from being an army responsible for everything -- to use a bad word, an occupying army -- to an army working with Palestinians to build peace.'' He smiles wistfully. ''It was an extraordinarily exciting mission. Yesterday you saw an armed Palestinian through cross hairs, and today you're driving with him to make peace.''

Tirza prepared maps for negotiations and took part in the talks. During the Oslo process, he says, ''Arafat named me Abu Kharita,'' Arabic for ''father of the map.'' Three summers ago he flew to the United States as an adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David summit meeting. In his laptop he carried the maps he had drawn of Israel's proposal for the borders of the Palestinian state-to-be. Precisely what Israel offered, and what West Bank land it proposed keeping, has been the subject of bitter disagreement since the summit meeting's failure. Palestinians say that Israel wanted to break the West Bank into cantons; Israelis reject that claim. The maps have yet to be published. Presumably, they remain in Tirza's high-security laptop, on which he is now designing the barrier: the computerized plow beaten, if not into a sword, at least into a shield.